Being mayor of Portland, Ore., may have gotten to Ted Wheeler. On Thursday, after finishing a speech at the Oregon Health Forum in which he was heckled, Wheeler mumbled, “I can’t wait for the next 24 months to be over,” indicating he may not seek re-election, the Oregonian reported. (TWEET-AT-LINK) "If you know me, you know I mutter quite a bit,” Wheeler said in a statement issued later in the day. “Not one of my most redeeming qualities. I will make a decision next year with my family if I am running for re-election." In previous media interviews, Wheeler has...

Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell plans to run for president in 2020, according to a person close to the California congressman who is familiar with his plans. “He’s definitely running,” the source said. This weekend, Swalwell will be the first potential presidential candidate to visit Iowa after the midterms with a trip to meet the Asian & Latino Coalition in Des Moines and Iowa Democratic Party chairs in Dubuque. The travel to Iowa was first reported by NBC News and confirmed by POLITICO. The 37-year-old Swalwell has been positioning himself for a run over the past year, with several trips to...

With the 2018 midterms now nearly decided, the traditional kickoff for the next election cycle — that is, the 2020 presidential election — would normally be getting underway. However lacking of a clear leader on the Democratic side, the 2020 election season is off to a slow start, with one exception. Hillary Clinton’s former advisers are duking it out over whether America will get to see Hillary 2.0....

Republicans thinking about opposing President Trump in the 2020 primaries are facing the hardest of political choices. Toppling a sitting president of your own party is a maneuver with the highest degree of difficulty. The most relevant historical model is probably Eugene McCarthy’s race against President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, which helped persuade the politically wounded Johnson to withdraw. But McCarthy had a clear policy handhold — opposition to an increasingly unpopular war — and appealed to a discontented element within his party. What are the handholds for a challenger to Trump? Economic conservatives are generally happy with the...

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Standing in an airplane hangar in the mid-autumn chill awaiting the arrival of President Trump, Joan Philpott said she was angry and scared. Only Mr. Trump, she said, can solve the problems she worries most about. “He wants to protect this country, and he wants to keep it safe, and he wants to keep it free of invaders and the caravan and everything else that’s going on,” said Ms. Philpott, 69, a retired respiratory therapist. Ms. Philpott was one of thousands of women who braved a drizzle for hours to have the chance to cheer Mr. Trump...

President Donald Trump's campaign on Wednesday sent an email fundraising off a lawsuit filed by CNN against the president and several members of his administration, saying voters should donate to help keep the media accountable. In an email with the subject line "Breaking: CNN SUES! Help Trump win," the president's campaign asked supporters to take a "media accountability survey" to help "fight back against the fake news attacks and deceptions." CNN is suing Trump and several members of his administration to reinstate reporter Jim Acosta's press access after it was revoked when he argued with the president during a news...

Former first lady Michelle Obama wrote that she was unable to put on a happy face and smile during President Donald Trump's inauguration in her new book, according to ABC News. "Someone from Barack's administration might have said that the optics there were bad, that what the public saw didn't reflect the President's reality or ideals, but in this case, maybe it did," Obama said in audio of the book. "Realizing it, I made my own optic adjustment. I stopped even trying to smile." In its interview with Obama, ABC News further quoted from her book, where the former first...

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told The Atlantic in an interview published Sunday that she doesn't know whether President Trump is stable. “I don’t know. You can’t make a diagnosis over TV, they tell me," Pelosi said when asked if she thinks the president is stable. Pelosi, who last week announced her bid to be the next Speaker, also told The Atlantic that anyone who watched President Trump's post-election news conference last week "would know that we have to pray for our country very deeply." “Pray for him, too, but for our country,” she added. Trump has previously defended...

Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., ripped Fox News on Friday for mocking "working-class people" after the news channel did a segment on her struggle to rent an apartment in Washington, D.C. "As I mentioned, we’ve been preparing and will be fine. However, it's been very revealing to see how gleefully Fox News hosts crack jokes about working-class people. It reveals what they actually think about us," she tweeted....

Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told The New York Times in an interview Thursday that she will need to wait for her congressional salary to kick in before she can rent an apartment in D.C. She explained that the transition period will be “very unusual, because I can’t really take a salary. I have three months without a salary before I’m a member of Congress. So, how do I get an apartment? Those little things are very real.” Ocasio-Cortez also told the Times that she had saved money before leaving her job at a restaurant and had planned accordingly with her...

Controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore on Wednesday said Democratic Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker would lose against President Trump in the 2020 election, suggesting the party should nominate a “beloved American” like Michelle Obama instead. Moore made the comments on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” following the results of the 2018 midterm elections, where Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives. “I think [Trump] is a tumor on our democracy,” Moore said. “But the tumor shrank last night. He has ripped apart and has taken us to the precipice of whether or not we are going to have the country...

'The Jimmy Dore Show' talks about the likely possibility that the final report from the Mueller investigation will never be made public, in light of a "public service announcement" from Politico. "Mueller report PSA: Prepare for disappointment," warns Politico's Darren Samuelson. "And be forewarned that the special counsel’s findings may never be made public." "President Donald Trump's critics have spent the past 17 months anticipating what some expect will be among the most thrilling events of their lives: special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report on Russian 2016 election interference. They may be in for a disappointment," Samuelson warned.

Corey Lewandowski managed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign for a year, co-wrote a book about it and keeps in close touch with Trump, as we were reminded last month, when The Times reported on a physical altercation between him and John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, just outside the Oval Office. So I figured that his thoughts about the best Democrat to take on Trump in 2020 were as germane as anybody’s. He told me that Mike Bloomberg worried him, because Bloomberg’s personal wealth would spare him the distraction of fund-raising, and that Joe Biden had the right instinct...

Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke doesn’t seem too keen on the tough-guy shtick adopted by some of his fellow Democrats. In an interview with New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, O’Rourke took at shot at celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti, arguing that the attorney, who regularly battles President Donald Trump on Twitter, “does not represent” Democrats. Avenatti is one among a chorus of Democrats who have twisted Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high” credo from the 2016 election in an effort to appear tougher against Trump and the GOP this time around. Avenatti’s version: “When they go low,...

The race for U.S. Senator from Texas is getting nastier by the day as early voting ends with election day just four days away. Republican Senator Ted Cruz this morning tweeted questioning whether O’Rourke’s campaign is illegally using campaign funds to fund the Honduran caravan headed for the border. "Two basic Qs every reporter should ask Beto today: (1) should the 'caravan' be allowed to cross illegally into Texas? (Beto refuses to answer.) And (2) did your campaign dollars illegally fund their doing so?" the senator tweeted.” Cruz maintains O’Rourke hasn’t answered either of those questions. In response, the O’Rourke...

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — When a Republican state legislator in Arkansas pushed last year to rename the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport in Little Rock, Clarke Tucker stood up for the former president. “The argument was that the people of Arkansas don’t support the Clintons,” said Mr. Tucker, a Democratic member of the state House of Representatives. “My thought at the time was, well, the people of Arkansas voted for Clinton eight times.” But now, as the Democratic nominee in the tightest congressional race in this state, Mr. Tucker is happy for the former president and his wife to...

Attorney Michael Avenatti on Sunday night assailed President Donald Trump’s “racism and bigotry,” painting himself as the working-class fighter who can stand up to the president’s “unusual cruelty” and “make America decent again.” An aggressive trial attorney and 2020 hopeful, Avenatti has sold himself as the Democrat tough enough to take on Trump. He’s best known for representing porn actress Stormy Daniels in her lawsuit against the president over what was characterized as a 2016 hush money payment. But his presidential ambitions took a major hit last week when he was quoted in Time magazine as saying the Democratic presidential...